Kristy surrounded by potential sperm donors.
When I finally jumped aboard the reality dating show vessel, it was in British waters. Here the swell is composed of the likes of Love Island, which sets barely-literate gym-mad 20-something singles loose in a sun-drenched villa; First Dates, a forensic view of unglamorous blind daters having a meal; and Naked Attraction, where singles judge the compatibility of potential mates by looking at their genitals, displayed for all to see in Perspex cases.
Just as with the British dating scene itself, our reality shows struggle to take the search for love particularly seriously. We prefer to titter and infer than earnestly and explicitly push it all to its limits. On Love Island, it is enough to consecrate your affinity by becoming girlfriend and boyfriend. Not so in America. In the land that invented modern dating and most of the romantic trappings that surround it, the quest for love is still a serious and rather formal business.
On TV, it also tends to be a pretty conservative business, where traditional ideas of marriage and family — and the gender roles to go with them — hold firm. Nearly 20 years after the original US marriage show The Bachelor first aired, American ingenuity unleashed to the world Netflix’s Love Is Blind, which saw pairs blind date their way to marriage proposals, talking through walls from respective isolation booths about their yearning for commitment and love and family. A number of them stressed their Christianity.
But as they continue to capitalise on the enduring hankering to say ‘I do’, American dating shows seem to also be cottoning onto, and even taking seriously, a reality that has long been lurking below the gloss of sugar-coated, youth-drenched romance: a steadily rising number of women pushing 40 are single, look fantastic, and want to start a family, with a man as a desired but optional partner in the enterprise. Love is Blind rejected the idea that — pace The Bachelor, The Bachelorette and Love Island — only women in their 20s are worth offering up for love on TV by giving us the spectacle of Jessica, 34, wrestling with whether to tie the knot with a man 10 years her junior and infinitely less successful than her.
But now there’s Fox’s Labor of Love (a UK airdate is expected soon) which is both deeply conservative at its core and — amazingly — properly radical in its practice. Indeed, in refuting the mouldy but persistent cultural idea that women over 40 are dried-up goods romantically and reproductively, I’d call it something of a feminist masterpiece.
The premise is that 15 men in their 30s and early 40s compete to be chosen as sperm donor, co-parent and — if all goes well — husband by the programmes’s star, one 41-year-old Kristy Katzmann. Through a variety of ‘drills’, which include responding to a grizzly bear at a campfire and hosting a kids’ party, the men demonstrate their instincts as potential fathers and partners.
There’s nothing flashily politically radical about this show: it progresses with staid civility, plenty of scented candles and glasses of red wine, with traditional values firmly in place. And yet in taking a single woman over 40 seriously as a potential mother and attractive wife, it is revolutionary.
For despite the advance of feminism since the 1970s, ideas about women, age, fertility and sexual appeal have remained strangely rigid. At nearly 38, I cannot count the number of times well-meaning people from all walks of life have told me about the many cliff-edges my fertility faces — at 30, at 35, at 37 and of course at 40. Fertility certainly declines in the course of our 30s, but not in the simplistic cliff-edges and sudden perilous wastages women are warned of; indeed much of the science of cliff-edges has been based on outdated studies (including a French study from the18th century). Few advance the flipside to older motherhood: true readiness, more self-knowledge, more money and know-how, better skills for coping with challenges.
Which is why it was so refreshing and soothing to watch Kristy in action: measured, polite, kindly, and serene with the authority of an older woman’s self-knowledge. It is a pleasure to watch her and presenter Kristin Davis, 55 (Charlotte on Sex and the City), an unmarried adoptive mother of two, calmly navigate Kristy’s options. Kristy is uninterested in garish shows of masculine bravado, or temper, or selfishness; she naturally and genuinely prioritises feelings of friendship over lust. The scene in which she dismisses the hunkiest suitor Alan, a writer from South Africa, for his subtle but significant tendency to put the other men before her, was impressive. As she noted: “20-year old Kristy would be chasing Alan,” but 41-year old Kristy wants something else.
For once, the idea of male fertility decline over age is taken seriously too. The programme is amazingly progressive (and accurate) in focusing on the fitness of sperm rather than of eggs. As soon as the suitors walk in they are asked to produce sperm samples to be counted and ranked. Kristy, after all, has gone to some trouble to preserve her own fertility, and will want to make sure any prospective father has the goods to follow through too, particularly in an age of declining sperm viability. Throughout the programme, too, there is rightful reference to the men’s ‘biological man clock’.
Perhaps what I liked most was that Labor of Love does not ask us to laugh at Kristy’s pickiness. On the contrary it is presented not as a prompt to think ‘no wonder she’s single and childless at 41’ but as commendable and wise realism. For as one gets older, the task of finding someone to partner with is more and more complex. It is particularly complex for women, who are better educated on average than men, and, particularly if they have not taken time out for childrearing, may be more successful too.
It is by now well documented that it is hard for women to find single men in their own age bracket who are both equally successful and supportive of her career. The pool shrinks further for women in their late 30s and early 40s since their male peers are more likely to pursue younger women — Kristy-aged women are seen as either too old to have babies or desperate for them. It is a tricky bottleneck. As Kristy says to Kristin over one elimination session: “suddenly I was in my late 30s [after a divorce] and it felt dark”. She sheds some tears as she makes this admission: I felt a surge of sympathy.
And there’s more radical realism from Labor of Love: having frozen her eggs, if none of the men end up suiting Kristy, she will go it alone. A husband would be nice, but as Kristy and an increasing number of single women know, he is not an essential part of the dream. The US fertility industry will be worth $15.4bn by 2023, up from $7bn in 2017. Pitted against each other, the competing ideologies of romance and motherhood tussle hard, with motherhood increasingly winning out, and so looking like empowerment with it.
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Subscribe“It is particularly complex for women, who are better educated on average than men, and, particularly if they have not taken time out for
childrearing, may be more successful too.”
I am glad to see this writer admit that women are surpassing men in education and professionally. This reality, which is very pronounced in the developed world, certainly doesn’t seem to slow down the feminist agenda, though, which continues to push for more advantages and special treatment for women due to “inequality”. But I do have to ask. What is ‘particularly complex’ about this? I think I know. As the writer says, a woman’s challenge is to find a man who is ‘equally successful and supportive of her career’. That’s interesting. I would say that she is revealing how women select men, their natural and decidedly *non-feminist* attraction to dominant males, because here equally successful is a minimum standard and more successful is for sure preferable, but less successful is definitely out. I mean really, what is wrong with a man who is less successful, say, has a relatively modest income or career? Well, he cannot dominate, ie. protect and provide as a traditional male does, that’s what’s wrong with him. Feminism indeed.
Indeed, feminists never thought that one through.
Another unfathomable belief feminists have is the expectation that women have a right to be found sexually attractive. Attraction is a natural instinct and no amount of social engineering will force someone to be sexually aroused by someone who doesn’t ‘do it’ for them, male or female.
Very few of us remain physically attractive beyond the age of 40, even more so when compared to younger age groups. What allows middle aged people to find partners is that many other middle aged people come to appreciate things other than just looks. But even then, female beauty is a huge factor in what gets a man’s heart racing. If a woman wants to take advantage of that it does not make sense to wait until she hits the four zero before she decides to settle down.
The feminist campaign to close the earnings gap (not a pay gap*) wants the government to force fathers to take on more of the childcare so earnings and pensions are equal.
Legislation may be necessary so men have the right to take time off from work.
The campaigners are silent on the pooling of earnings and pensions that is common with married couples.
*It’s not a pay gap because that would be illegal – see equal pay legislation.
Silent about pooling of earnings I guess because that’s evidence of men and women actually cooperating and respecting each other’s contributions, rather than engaging in a power struggle against oppression.
Exactly.
As a single mother I take exception to this whole premise. It should never be about the woman’s “right” to reproductive fulfilment, only about what is best for the resulting child. While of course children suffer all kinds of pain and difficulty when born into bad relationships, they do NEED both parents equally. I have understood only recently how much my own son suffered from not having his father around when he was growing up – to see his first steps and hear his first words, to love him and guide him on his journey to manhood. Also I have understood only recently how much I myself missed, by having the wrong priorities. I couldn’t help prioritising career. I had to earn the money to put food on the table. But he suffered from the assortment of ill chosen nannies I left him with and I missed so much. I am a better grandmother than I ever was a mother, because I have the time and the values and the wisdom I lacked 40 years ago. I guess one benefit is that my son is a way better father than his dad was. He understands what his children would lack if he were not. I urge Kristy not to do it, unless the man really will be a full partner, at least as a father.
I’m not surprised that a television studio would want to air this farce to viewers who would look at this dystopian sperm world with a dried up women (no matter how sazzy she looked). Every single living thing on this planet Earth, be it plant, tree, insect, fish, bird, mammal or reptile is trying to reproduce from the exact moment it is capable – all, that is, except western women. So we now have a fish bowl to marvel at the idiocy of a woman who has simply left it too late because she was told by feminism that everything other than her own baby was more important.
The OED definition of “feminism” begins “Advocacy of equality of the sexes…”
In nominating “Labor of Love” as a “feminist masterpiece” the author would appear to be deliberately courting controversy in order to perpetuate the mutual slanging match that characterises feminist discourse from both the male and female perspectives. Unless ,that is, she is seriously encouraging single 40-something women to include “must be able to wrestle a grizzly bear” in their Tinder match requirements. There is clearly nothing equal in either the format of the aforementioned TV programme or the article itself. There is however an underlying sadness in this article that may explain why many 40-something women are struggling to find their PERFECT partner (or disposable sperm donor in this case).
In reducing a man to a list of useful attributes that are required to tick all of the woman’s boxes the man is being objectified in a similar way to how women have been by men for centuries. Not only is this not equality but it is also doomed to failure in a society where the objectified man or woman has the option of saying no to such an arrangement. A more distorted and one-sided view of the ideal relationship is difficult to imagine and yet it is the one we now see more than any other in both social and traditional media.
If the author is encouraging 40-something women who “look fantastic and want to start a family, with a man as a desired but optional partner in the enterprise” to follow such a path then may I humbly suggest they start lying about their true intentions. It may come as a shock when they get few replies from the successful (read wealthy) bear-wrangling, party organising types with a high sperm count, also presumably Oxbridge educated, tall, full-haired and athletic with a high IQ thrown in.
There have been many studies on dating that conclude that men have a much shorter list of requirements in a partner than women do. If a feminist writer wants to help more women find fulfilling and long lasting relationships in middle age surely stressing personality and mutual interests over such a long and unrealistic set of must-haves would have a much better success rate.
The theme of this show sounds rather contrived. What is the great appeal to a man to be in a competition with so many others for nothing more than being chosen a sperm donor? What is so exciting about being a sperm donor?
I suspect that the men on this show are either paid to be there or are participating because they want some personal publicity. Otherwise they could be out having real sex on a 1:1 basis with an attractive woman who is interested in them being more than a mere sperm donor.
I suspect I’ll give this one a miss.
“Indeed, in refuting the mouldy but persistent cultural idea that women over 40 are dried-up goods romantically and reproductively, I’d call it something of a feminist masterpiece.”
Women over 40 do not have fertility falling off a cliff edge because of culture, but because of biology. Next thing you’re going to say death is a cultural construct and that we actually all live forever.
The writer is an idiot. I know it’s hardly a profound riposte, but this sort of opinion isn’t worth the candle.
Sperm quality and adequacy of pension. Which is first?
Seems like another burgeoning industry ready to make the most out of damaging society.
In today’s episode we convince you that you can still be fertile in your forties…just so long at you pay tens of thousands in IVF.